Donald Trump Is the Worst of ESPN’s Comments Section

The President of the United States demands an apology from a SportsCenter anchor who hurt his feelings.

Earlier this week, ESPN publicly tut-tutted SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill for having the audacity to publicly share her opinion of Donald Trump, cravenly prostrating itself at the feet of mouthbreathing STICK TO SPORTS idiots everywhere who though it outrageous that a person who talks about sports for a living might care about other things, too. This was not good enough for White House press secretary and sneering moron Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who trotted out to the podium on Wednesday and called for the network to fire Hill for her "outrageous" remarks. Hill later apologized for "painting ESPN in an unfair light" with her actions, which, judging from this missive that emanated from the Oval Office early Friday morning, still wasn't sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.

Aside from the potential merits of his parenthetical—First Take really is grating—this is otherwise garbled nonsense, as it would require an especially creative imagination to conclude that any of Hill's criticisms are objectively false statements. (For a man who is now very angry about being called a white supremacist, he sure spent a lot of time yesterday offering another staunch defense of murderous white supremacists!) Nonetheless, the President of the United States took it upon himself to become the worst brand of spellcheck-averse Facebook commenter, eagerly weighing in on a media company's HR matter because one of its employees said something that hurt his feelings. Also, if learning of Hill's measured, eloquent critique is really all it takes to send him into a 140-character rage, it seems safe to conclude that the president is not a regular reader of GQ.

As if some kind of sixth sense for performative conservative outrage allowed her to see the presidential rebuke before it happened, former journalist and noted paragon of civility Britt McHenry was ready with a carefully-assembled straw man to dutifully thrash as soon as Trump made his demand:

In McHenry's mind, apparently, those alarmed by Trump's call for an apology are perturbed not at the notion of a high-ranking executive official openly calling for a private employer to punish its employee for criticizing the government, but instead at the fact that that person's job is... related to sports, which is... something President Obama liked, I guess? Most of McHenry's occasional public appearances since her departure from ESPN have been standard-fare disingenuous right-wing bleating, but this one is too incoherent to be grouped into the same category with any degree of confidence.

It's hard not to notice that of the multitude of attacks aimed at Donald Trump's presidency by journalists and writers and pundits from both sides of the ideological spectrum, one of the few that he simply could not allow to go unanswered came from a high-profile woman, and a person of color to boot—two demographic groups whose criticisms he has not historically handled well. It is not that her comments were the harshest, or the most thorough, or the most damning, or the most bombastic. It is that he believes she has no business talking to him like that, and that of all the voices he could elect to take on, hers would be the easiest target for his petty bullying. By having the courage to stand by the substance of her remarks, Jemele Hill sought to prove him wrong. By caving to the president and his fellow comments-section trolls who spend their time and energy relentlessly excoriating her, ESPN proved him right.